Crimes and confessions, copy-pasted

Allow me a bit of self-praise and a confession. I scored good marks in school, never cheated, but once helped a buddy to cheat. The bloke copied my essay verbatim, and got caught by repeating my mistakes.

- R. PRASANNAN

Our sleuths are as naive as my buddy at times. Look at the confessions of the 13 accused in the 2006 Mumbai train blast case (187 killed; 817 hurt). Making use of anti-terror laws that allowed confessions to cops as evidence, they got all the 13 to sing and sign their sins. It didn't need rocket science for the Bombay High Court judges to find the statements were all from the same template, extracted through torture and tutoring. They read so similar—names, dates and deeds minorly altered—that the judges made comparative charts of the texts of the 13 confessions. Straight copy-paste jobs! Worse, even the police medics had recorded torture marks on the accused's bodies. The court had no go but to let them go, a few weeks ago.